###« While investigating a wide spectrum of political issues, the theatre of Michel Vinaver concentrates on the everyday “le quotidien” using the contemporary situation as its major point of articulation. His theatre distances itself, however, from ‘slice of life’ realism since his plays are not exact imitations of the characters and manners of a given social class; they are extracts from everyday speech and activities, which illustrate circumstances and conditions. Relying on montage rather than linear story line, Vinaver attempts to jolt his audience from a position of passive consumption by portraying the familiar environment of home and work in an unexpected light.

We begin our analysis by comparing Vinaver’s theatre to other twentieth-century political theatre in France; our subsequent study divides Vinaver’s plays thematically in order to show the scope of his political scrutiny.

Written and set in the 1950s, his early plays portray France as a splintered nation whose sense of political community “la patrie” is severely compromised by colonial wars. In his later plays Vinaver focuses on industrial capitalism showing, on one had, the successful beginnings of multinationalism in France ; the productive forces no longer guarantee the development of capital and property, yet capitalism draws its web tightly around people, binding them to its system through the economic and social necessities of work. On the other hand, Vinaver shows how multinational administration gradually replaces the astute marketing campaigns of competitive capitalism. Capitalism expands its global influence, but the drive to dominate the world market alienates employer as well as employee. Consequently, the confidence displayed by management withers and the capitalist system reaches a crisis point.

In our final chapter we consider the extension of market-place values into the home, and the political implications of family conflicts Vinaver situates the private realm of domestic life in a political context, which illustrates the connections between domestic confrontation and the unequal power relationships and injustices of the wider society. Through fragmented plot, dialogue, and stage space Michel Vinaver creates a subversive montage of government politics, industrial capitalism, and daily life in contemporary France. »

« The study investigates the plural nature of the structural patterns and intertextual fragments that can be isolated in four plays by contemporary French playwright, Michel Vinaver : Iphigenia Hotel(Iphigenie Hotel), Overboard(Pardessus bord), Dissident, / goes without saying(Dissident, il va sans dire), The Everyday(L’Ordinaire). Drawing from four plays and from critical commentaries on them, a variety of types of intertextuality that appear in these plays are analyzed in terms of three basic structural paradigms found in Vinaver’s writing as a whole: the archeological, the historical, and the lyrical. The “archeological” nature of intertextuality is investigated in Vinaver’s Iphigenia Hotel. Henry Green’s novel, Loving, is studied as the primary “archeological relic,” or intertextual counterpart to Iphigenia Hotel. Green’s Lovingis the intertext that underlines how literary, cinematic, mythical, and everyday patterns have been woven into the overall fabric of Vinaver’s play. A wide variety of these intertextual fragments, including those from twentieth century artists (Picasso, Dubuffet, Y. Klein, Oldenberg), scholars (Dumezil, Brown, Cornford), classical authors (Shakespeare, Rabelais, Montaigne, Swift), as well as twentieth century texts based on contemporary corporate affairs, Nazi S S “aktions” during World War Two, Happenings in the 1960s, contemporary social concerns and religious mythology are all examined in respect to four principal characters in Overboardto show how the dual meanings of “historical,” as in “History” and “his (the playwright’s) story,” appear in the play. Four main characters are investigated as four partially abstracted, fractured, and interconnected self-portraits of the playwright in search of a sense of meaning while living in the highly volatile 1960s. The poetry of the spoken and the unspoken dimensions of dialogue in one of Vinaver’s short “chamber plays,” Dissident, / goes without saying, focuses on a mosaic of potential meanings that can be drawn from Vinaver’s use of grammar and syntax. The study investigates how lyricism works on broader metaphorical levels by looking at three intertextual counterparts found in The Everyday, Vinaver’s equivocal portrait of contemporary corporate dynamics. Literary, socio-political, corporate, mythological, and everyday patterns woven into The Everydayserve as focal points for the investigation of intertextual debris. »
(Résumé disponible via UMI-Proquest)
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###« Herein we demonstrate that many playwrights who have considered themselves “realists” have found it necessary to have recourse, not to some form of unmediated direct observation of the real, but instead to styles of painters who were their contemporaries. We have chosen to illustrate this pattern by examining the ways in which borrowing from painterly perspectives has influenced the eighteenth century in the work of Denis Diderot, the nineteenth in that of Emile Zola, and the twentieth in the plays of Michel Vinaver. We survey two plays of each author under the five headings of “tableau”, “perspective”, “spectator”, “frame”, and “portrait”, which taxonomize the links between painting and the theatre. While Diderot and Zola are not primarily remembered for their plays, this does not mitigate the pattern of looking to the pictorial arts to construct reality, but rather merely indicates that each subsequent age does not accept the reality of its predecessor, not the least in part because of the evolution of painting in the interim. We fully expect to see this trend continue. »
(Résumé joint à la thèse)